OT wordprocessing anyone?

[richard lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

Do folk here have recommendations about how to do wordprocessing?  I 
am looking for solutions that allow well formatted technical 
documents, with the possibility of using well-designed templates in a 
modern typographic style.  Interoperability and/or ease of import and 
export is important, as is handling of tables and inclusion of 
spreadsheets and graphics.

A few words of background:

When I first threw windoze out the window, I was happy to switch to 
what was really just a linux clone of a doze working environment -- 
KDE plus OpenOffice, etc.  Gradually, I've come to prefer a Mies van 
der Rohe "Less is more" approach.   I've shed KDE for icewm, and have 
substantially stopped using OO -- I don't like to wait so long for 
these huge applications to load.  I tried to move to Lyx for document 
processing, but have become frustrated by the rigidity of the 
templates, which produce ugly documents that look as though they were 
typed up by a 1930s legal secretary.  As a graphic designer, I find 
them quite unacceptable and would set about writing new templates and 
underlying latex classes, if I had time to learn enough latex.  The 
same criticism applies to kile -- it can only do as well as the 
available classes, which is pretty abysmal.  What would really work 
for me is Lyx together with a Latex class editor based on the same 
interface.  

This is obviously not a debian question, but I sure the clever people 
on this list will have found other *nix solutions that I have missed.

TIA 

-- 
richard